President Bush on Bridge Safety: Spend Smarter Not More

AP reports that President Bush is opposed to raising gasoline taxes so we can have more bridge inspections:

A week after a deadly bridge collapse in Minneapolis, President Bush on Thursday dismissed raising the federal gasoline tax to repair bridges at least until Congress changes how it spends highway money. “The way it seems to have worked is that each member on that (Transportation) committee gets to set his or her own priorities first,” Bush said. “That’s not the right way to prioritize the people’s money. Before we raise taxes, which could affect economic growth, I would strongly urge the Congress to examine how they set priorities.”

Alice Rivlin would be impressed. Her counsel to John Kerry during the 2004 Presidential race was spend smarter, not more. So President Bush is arguing that we should spend more transportation dollars on repairing bridges and less on bridges to nowhere. I would find this to be a credible argument from a President who had a track record of allocating our Federal dollars where most needed for public policy reasons. But when President Bush has discussed priorities in the past, it would seem his mantra for spending our Federal monies wisely was more driven by some Karl Rove calculus to maximize GOP votes than to maximize the General Welfare. But if President Bush has decided to finally adopt the fiscal wisdom of Alice Rivlin, I say: IT’S ABOUT TIME!